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Firefox 3.1 Alpha "Shiretoko" Released

Just as you were getting used to 3.0, those Mozilla guys have announced 3.1's Alpha release. FTA "Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an 'early developer milestone,' the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar." You can download it if you dare.

14 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Randle_Revar · · Score: 5, Funny

    thankfully, no

  2. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyone! Over here quickly, and bring your camera! I found the one person who likes the Awesome bar!

  3. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The awesome bar works a bit like google pagerank, by creating associations between your partial input and the page you choose from the menu. If you write the initial letter of the desired URL and then click on the page you want to visit, it will (very) soon behave like the old URL bar.

  4. woohoo! by lucas+teh+geek · · Score: 5, Informative

    it's only taken 6 years, but finally Firefox has the option to use the Mac OS X System specified proxy. here's hoping it actually works

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    TIAEAE!
  5. Re:Awesome bar disable? by hansamurai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I actually love it, being able to type just an 's' to go to slashdot, or an 'x' to go to xkcd. But I know you're just trolling so whatever.

  6. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Verteiron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I loathed the Awesomebar too. When I first started using it I would type "s" and it would list sites I only visited once, a year ago, because they had an "s" somewhere near the end of the URL, while sites with 's' near the beginning were listed much lower. This is obviously broken functionality, but I'm seeing less and less of that sort of thing the longer I use it. The longer you use it the better it gets; it has some kind of sorting algorithm that takes a while to get going properly. I have found typing a single word of the page title to relocate a page useful on occasion, and I now go for days at a time without cursing this unremovable feature.

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    End of lesson. You may press the button.
  7. Hmm, not sure about this by neokushan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The build includes a new tab-switching behavior that will force some users to change their habits. In the current version of FIrefox, Control-Tab opens up the next browser tab. Shiretoko changes this behavior, opening up a "filmstrip view" of a user's most-recently visited tabs. Pressing Tab repeatedly while holding down the Control key cycles through the various Tabs in a filmstrip. Developers say the filmstrip addition is a step toward "increased visual navigation and content organization."(Users who simply want to advance to the next tab can use Control-Page Down instead of Control-Tab).

    I, personally, do not use Ctrl+tab to switch between tabs in firefox but I do not like the idea of them changing this functionality. In various other programs I use that have tabs, from mIRC to Visual studio (no, sorry, I haven't switched to *nix yet), ctrl+tab is the natural choice to swap between open tabs/windows and I do occasionally use this command here. It just seems universally consistent between most applications and Mozilla has decided to move away from this unofficial standard.
    Wouldn't it be better to give this new functionality a new shortcut key, such as the aforementioned ctrl+pgdn?
    Even Microsoft created a new shortcut key combination for Flip3D in vista and left the old alt+tab command more or less in tact.

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    +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
  8. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    That worked just fine in FF2. Now when I type s I get "eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices". I bought something online recently. God only knows how long it will take their ridiculous 'frecency' algorithm to realize I only go to eBay once in a while. Nothing like unpredictable, unreliable behavior to make a feature suck. Thanks, awesomebar!

  9. Re:Awesome bar disable? by jomas1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't know why you are being presented maps.google.com when you enter an "s". Personally I love this feature. Now if I want to go to the University of Houston's website I can start typing "Houston" rather than remember something conter-intuitive like https://www.ed2go.com/ (which is the UofH homepage)

    For me Firefox is now bookmarking every site I visit and allowing me to search for these sites by keywords in the url or title of the webpage. This is much more useful than manually keeping a list of bookmarks that become useless as soon as there are too many to view without scrolling.

  10. Re:Awesome bar disable? by spinkham · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you only have 20 places you want to go, that's what the bookmarks toolbar is for. It has a "most visited" dropdown by default, and room for at least 15 or so one click launches if you keen the names short.

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    Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
  11. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For me Firefox is now bookmarking every site I visit

    That's the problem. The awesome bar conflates two different and important functions, the address bar and bookmarks. If they had provided a smart bookmarks feature instead of ruining the address bar, no one would be complaining.

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    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  12. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are you trolling? The awesomebar lives up to its name. Among all the other good stuff that came with 3, that one stands out and I wasn't expecting it to.

    red pro -> programming.reddit.com
    flix mem -> www.netflix.com/memberHome
    s gmail -> https://gmail.com

    It even pulls words out of the titles of pages I've visited, so I don't even have to remember the url.

    As a web developer it makes my work easier as I can type in for example 'dev lookup 1445' and it will often pull up a url like www.longdevsitename.com/longblah/lookup.php?uid=1445, which often happens to be exactly what I was looking for. Firefox 2 doesn't even come close to this.

  13. Re:Awesome bar disable? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    However, if you want to look at a Wikipedia article about Dashiell Hammett that you read last week, it makes a lot more sense to type "Dash" in the address bar than "wikip^H^H^H^H^Hen.wikipedia.org/Dash."

    Actually it makes more sense to just put "Dashiell Hammett" into the search bar. It makes no sense to put anything other than addresses into the address bar.

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    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  14. Re:Awesome bar disable? by nabsltd · · Score: 5, Informative

    I didn't use Firefox 2, so I don't know the exact functionality, but I don't think it takes much to get the "Awesome Bar" like people seem to want (matches only at the beginning of URL, no match on titles).

    First install the Hide Unvisited extension. Next, set "browser.urlbar.search.chunkSize = 0" in about:config. Last, add the following to your "userChrome.css" file:

    .autocomplete-richlistitem spacer,.autocomplete-richlistitemlabel{display:none}
    .ac-title description{font-size:11px!important}
    .autocomplete-richlistitem{border:none!important}
    .ac-title{margin:-4px 4px 0px 0px!important;display:none}
    .ac-url{margin:-19px 0px 0px 20px!important}
    .ac-url description{color:MenuText!important}
    .ac-url description[selected="true"]{color:White!important}